Today is the day!

After months of procrastinating, polishing, reworking, pulling out my hair and just generally being SO OVER THIS PROCESS, I am finally submitting my final retake of Entry 1. I feel much more confident about the entry this year than I did last year. My good friend read the entry and gave me some great feedback on it too. I think that more and more throughout this process I have had to realize I am a learner too. I'm not perfect by any means and this process really puts that in your face whether or not you want to admit it! I've made some great gains right along with my kiddos and I will never regret deciding to do National Board.

I only need a half point before the weighting to certify on this entry and I think by looking through what I had a year ago and what I've done this year...there just isn't any way that I won't make it. I'm cautiously optimistic though--I was SO SURE last year that I'd nail it and I didn't. By 0.375 of a point before the weight. So I'm not trying to be cocky. I'm trying to be realistic. I KNOW this entry is a million times better than the one I submitted last year. Is it perfect? I doubt it. But my insights toward my own teaching and the growth of my student are much better after having gone through the full process last year and being able to focus solely on one entry all of this year. 

I'm glad that I've procrastinated as ridiculous as that probably sounds....it has allowed me to really step back, really read the entry again with fresh eyes, get feedback from someone else and then sit on it again. This is exactly how I did my master's project too. I was gung ho on it and then sat on it for almost a month before I submitted my final copy. 

It will be a huge relief to get this thing off my hands for the last time. I am so glad I did most of it last year when I had one solid grade because I don't know how I would have managed to do it all this year with a split grade. I probably would be in a padded cell. My biggest realization is that this is not the kind of writing that I like to do because you can't write it like a term paper--you HAVE to cut the fluff which means you are often grammatically incorrect and it drives me insane to write like that. Crazy insane. 

Alas, this is it. I'm not going to have to write like this again. At least not until renewal time and that's 10 years away. I may be willing to stomach it again nine years from now.